Sr. Site Reliability Engineer III

Catapult Federal Services; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 185,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Catapult Federal Services in the United States is seeking a Sr. Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) III to design, deploy, and maintain mission-critical workloads on VMware or Kubernetes while ensuring scalability, availability, and government compliance.

You will build automated CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and configuration management across development, integration, staging, and production environments. The ideal candidate has 7+ years in software or systems roles, an active Top Secret clearance

Qualifications

• Active Top Secret clearance required; higher clearance preferred.
• DoD 8140 certification or equivalent security credentials.
• Bachelor’s degree in CS or related field preferred; relevant experience may substitute.
• 7+ years in software development, systems engineering, or operations with reliability ownership.
• Experience blending software engineering with systems administration for highly available apps.
• Experience designing monitoring, alerting, and observability to meet SLIs/SLOs.
• Incident response, root cause analysis, and continuous improvement experience.
• Proficiency with Ansible, GitLab CI/CD, Bash scripting, Kubernetes, and F5 load balancers.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, and maintain mission-critical workloads on VMware or Kubernetes, ensuring scalability, availability, and government compliance.
• Develop and sustain automated CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and configuration management for reliable delivery and observability.
• Provision and maintain developer environments and toolchains for rapid, secure development workflows aligned to the mission.
• Identify developer friction and implement solutions to enable developer-first environments.
• Establish and maintain customer trust through deep technical expertise and innovative mission-aligned solutions.
• Lead or participate in incident response, root cause analysis, and continuous improvement activities.

Skills

Top Secret clearance

DoD 8140 certification

Ansible

GitLab CI/CD

Bash scripting

Kubernetes

F5 load balancer

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related engineering field

Tools

Ansible

GitLab CI/CD

Kubernetes

F5 load balancer

MinIO / S3-compatible storage

Job description

As a Sr. Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) III, you’ll work as part of a collaborative and high-performing team providing your expertise to deliver technical solutions within the highest levels of the federal government.

What you’ll do:

• Design, deploy, and maintain mission-critical application workloads on virtualized or containerized environments (e.g., VMWare or Kubernetes), ensuring scalability, availability, and compliance with government requirements.
• Develop and sustain automated CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and configuration management workflows to support reliable software delivery and operational observability across development, integration, staging, and production environments.
• Provision, configure, and maintain developer environments and toolchains to support rapid, secure, and efficient development workflows, enabling mission-aligned software delivery.
• Identify developer friction across the software development lifecycle and implement solutions to reduce that friction and provide developer-first environments.
• Establish and maintain a high level of customer trust and confidence through deep technical expertise, and use creativity to provide innovative solutions that fit the customer’s mission needs.

What you’ll need to succeed:

• Active Top Secret clearance, or higher.
• Certification meeting DoD 8140 (e.g., Security+ or higher).
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related engineering field is preferred; relevant experience may substitute.
• 7+ years of experience in software development, systems engineering, or operations roles with responsibility for availability, performance, and reliability of production systems.
• Demonstrated experience blending software engineering and systems administration practices to support highly available, scalable applications.
• Experience designing and managing monitoring, alerting, and observability solutions to meet defined Service Level Objectives.
• Experience leading or participating in incident response, root cause analysis, and continuous improvement activities.
• Experience with Ansible and Desired State Configuration.
• Experience with GitLab CI/CD automation and Bash scripting.
• Experience with Kubernetes, supporting container-native storage and object storage solutions (e.g., MinIO, S3-compatible services, PortWorx).
• Experience with enterprise load-balancing solutions (e.g., F5 or similar platforms).
• Ability to contribute immediately with minimal ramp-up in a mission-critical operational environment.

This position is designated as essential personnel supporting continuity of operations and may require work during government shutdowns, emergencies, or other critical situations.

SALARY RANGE: $185,000 - $230,000

The salary range for this position is determined based on qualifications, skills, and relevant experience.